Wireless networks rely on a large number of individual base stations to provide high capacity wireless services over large coverage areas such as market areas (e.g. cities), surrounding residential areas (e.g. suburbs, counties), highway corridors and rural areas. Continuous radio connectivity across these large coverage areas is accomplished via user mobility from one base station to others as the user traverses the network's operating area. High reliability mobility is an essential aspect of mobile wireless networks in order to minimize the number of dropped calls or other abnormal discontinuation of radio service to the supported users.
A key feature of all modern multi-base station mobility networks is the creation and maintenance of Neighbor Lists for each base station within the network. Each base station transmits its list of nearby neighbor cells to mobile devices such that a mobile device can continuously monitor the radio frequencies defined in the list and search for higher quality base stations to which it may handover if and when the mobile device experiences degraded signal quality from its current serving radio base station. During active call sessions the mobile device continually monitors the quality of its serving base station and scans the defined frequency and or scrambling code combinations defined on its current neighbor list searching for suitable quality candidates.
Automated Neighbor Relations (ANR) processes facilitate ongoing neighbor list management by evaluating historical performance reports and adding, deleting or reprioritizing list neighbors accordingly. However, ANR processes may require the existence of an initial neighbor list at each wireless base station containing at least one valid nearby neighbor. This requirement to have some initial provisioning of neighbor lists prior to running ongoing neighbor list optimization algorithms presents a challenge when new cells are added to an existing network. Conventionally, the original neighbor list at each newly added cell is determined through a manual planning processes prior to the execution of any automated ANR processing.